Several months ago I started downloading podcasts to listen to on road trips, and I discovered that there are a ton of really interesting free podcasts available online. I love listening to People's Pharmacy from NPR, This American Life is usually pretty good, I'm becoming a sucker for James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and we have a local public radio station that has a great program interviewing various people from around our region.
Hearing the same quasi-country songs over and over again or bad talk radio really doesn't compare to these podcasts available online. However, burning them onto CDs for my car is such a pain. Each CD only can handle 1 or 2 podcasts at a time because I need to burn them in an uncompressed format for the car stereo to read the CD. And you can't use CD-RW discs in a car stereo. What a waste.
Here's the solution for people like me without an iPod or other means to easily play a podcast in a car: Soundfly SD WMA/MP3 Player Car Fm Transmitter
It came in the mail the other day and it's this little device that plugs into the cigarette lighter and has an opening for a regular USB disk to fit into. It broadcasts to the car's radio, so you just need to tune the radio to an unoccupied wavelength, and tune the Soundfly to that same wavelength, and you can listen to whatever podcasts are on the USB disk.
I would be less impressed if this was expensive technology I'm talking about. It's not. The Soundfly was $40 with shipping, and required about 30 seconds of setup/manual reading.
The ironic thing is that I really wanted to have a car ride yesterday so I could listen to it, and it was the only day of the past two weeks that we were in the car less than 15 minutes!
